Scandal in Lenox

"The place resolved itself into a bare and dirty room, with a couple of windows, whereof a tenth part might be of glass, the remainder being stopped up with old copybooks and paper. . . . The walls were so stained and discoloured that it was impossible to tell whether they had ever been touched with paint or whitewash. ...

"As [the students] lay closely packed together, covered, for warmth's sake, with their patched and ragged clothes, little could be distinguished but the sharp outlines of pale faces, over which the sombre light shed the same dull heavy colour. . . ."

--Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby

The prosperous, picturesque Berkshire Mountain village of Lenox, Mass, is the last place anyone would be likely to look for a U.S. school even remotely suggestive of Dickens' wretched Dotheboys Hall. Until the recent cold wave hit, few people in Lenox knew what was really going on inside the 44-room onetime private mansion which housed the tony ($1,400 a year) Duncan School for Boys. Then the school pipes froze and a plumber was called in.

He rushed out last week with an astonishing story. The place was a shambles. The floors were spattered with broken window panes and flakes of paint from the wall. The radiators and all 15 toilets were frozen. Down in the laundry room, the 22 students, blue-skinned, dirty, tattered and hungry, were huddled around a pot-bellied stove. One 13-year-old had a leg broken in two places.

Swiftly, the local board of health and a state building inspector condemned the school on 37 counts, sent the injured boy to a hospital, moved the others to homes and the Y.M.C.A. in nearby Pittsfield.

Career of a Schoolmaster. Head of Duncan School was suave, thick-set William Callaway Duncan, 53, son of a onetime Georgia Senator. Educated at the University of Georgia, Columbia, Yale and Oxford, he made a name for himself! in 26 years (1914-40) as head of Irving Lower School in Tarrytown, N.Y., made many a prosperous acquaintance through a thriving summer camp which he started at Newport, Vt. in 1916. In 1940, with money left him by his aunt, he struck out for himself, opened an expensive school near New Milford, Conn. The building shortly burned down. Then he moved his school into rented quarters in Great Barrington, Mass. The property was abruptly sold.

As his inheritance dwindled, Schoolmaster Duncan began to slip. Struggling to stay in business, he rented the mansion in Lenox for $200 a month from one Bene Virgilio. When the plumber walked in, Duncan was out of town (for the fifth straight week) on business.

"No Law Against It." He had left the school in charge of furtive, soft-voiced John K. Wolcott, a 61-year-old chaplain-teacher. He had no help except a young teacher named Robert Newton. Last week the Reverend Mr. Wolcott, who has worked for Duncan for years but says he has not been paid since last spring, offered feeble excuses for the lack of sheets ("It's too cold for sheets"), the lack of heat ("There's no law you have to keep a school piping hot"), the single dining-study-play room ("I don't think there's a law [against it]"). Even more puzzling was the stout defense of Duncan and his school which the older students, backed by their embarrassed parents, put up.

State police soon established some facts. Some of the older boys paid no tuition because Duncan was "indebted to them or their families." Left mostly to shift for themselves, they had ganged up on the younger ones, appointed a steward, "coach," and "doctor" of their own.

At week's end all but five of the boys had been sent home. Teacher Newton quit. Owner Virgilio started a $15,000 property suit against Duncan.

How Could It Happen? Unlike some states, Massachusetts has no supervisory body for private schools, leaves accrediting solely to local school committees. Almost the only checkup is an annual questionnaire concerning enrollment, attendance, courses. Building inspectors come around only when alterations are made; they did not bother Duncan because he made none.

Observed Porter Sargent, famed Boston educational adviser and editor of the authoritative Handbook of Private Schools: "There are much worse schools than [Duncan]. There is a whole underworld of schools."

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